Despite the best efforts of high modernist architects and urban designers to privilege openness and continuous space, to do away with enclosure altogether, the contemporary global city is as much an interior condition as an exterior one. Early manifestations of the 'urban interior' appeared in late-nineteenth-century America, when skyscraper architects designed elaborate lobbies mimicking and competing with the streets outside. In the post-war era the invention of new architectural technologies allowed these public-scaled interiors to extend beyond the boundaries of the city block. Air-conditioning, fluorescent lighting, the escalator and long-span structural systems made possible the vast interior spaces characteristic of our contemporary urban landscape: the shopping mall, the office complex and the airport terminal (Koolhaas, 1995(Koolhaas, , 2000. Intrigued by the possibility of these mega-scale interiors, late-modern architects and designers began to adopt strategies typically associated with urban design in their conceptualization of these spaces (Stickells, 2006; Rice, 2016). 1 At the same time, just as commercial interiors began to acquire the scale and form of the public street, huge swathes of exterior space came under the control of corporate entities or public-private groups such as Business Improvement Districts: organizations that employ almost domestic-scale housekeeping strategies, such as the installation of seating and lighting, in an attempt to render city streets safe and comfortable for middle-class consumers (Mallett, 1994).Consequently it may be argued that conventional concepts of interiority and exteriority, public and private, are of little use in describing the formal, spatial and social character of the late-modern megalopolis. In this proposition, to suggest a strict division between urban and interior design has become as problematic as drawing a clear line between built form and landscape, between the city and nature. How might we approach the analysis and design of such a confusing territory when conventional design concepts, practices and tools are no longer sufficient? In considering this question, the recent formulation of 'urban interiors' shows much promise. Discussing her self-identification as an 'urban interiorist', the designer
Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what was later called the ‘New World’, was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. While it has been called the ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’, discussion of racial exclusion and marginalization is mostly absent in the city's architecture and urban history. This article investigates how architecture and urban design helped reinforce the colonizers’ control over enslaved peoples. Specifically, we explore the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood, its church and the slave warehouse known as La Negreta. Drawing on historical maps and archival documents, we draw attention to how the spatial and material construction of Santa Bárbara constituted and maintained social and racial structures of oppression.
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The American economist Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) has been used to support and define concepts of architectural modernity for more than one hundred years. Best known for introducing the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” this influential book has been especially valuable for historians of the architecture of consumer culture. Yet curiously, Veblen’s own architectural examples have escaped scholarly attention. This article explores the link Veblen drew between Gothic Revival architecture and cultural barbarism. Inverting the concepts and terminology of race science, Veblen used the image of the Gothic Revival university to criticize the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Seen through the lens of Veblen’s writing, Henry Ives Cobb’s design for the University of Chicago (1891–97), where Veblen taught for fourteen years, represents the transformation of leisure-class aesthetics under the logic of capitalism.
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